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As magazines, books, letters and other uses of pulp drift into the digital
landscape, it's only fitting that curator David Michael Lee's
“STOCK/california” at Coastline Art Gallery should honor that fade into
oblivion, gathering eight artists, all of whom use paper in their work. Sadly,
while the uneven work on display should have caused me to shed a
Luddite tear, it instead made me mourn the loss of the trees that died to
create it.
Less impressive is Lee's decision to include the remaining five artists. Not
because they don't each have at least one piece that's intriguing, but
because Sullivan, Siff and Dowling set the content bar so high the others'
work just falls flat. Steven Perlin's Untitled series consists of building a
piece around a cut-out image (a car, a bike), painting, papering and
drawing on the canvas to fill up the remaining space. The end result is
mundane, sloppily painted and poorly drawn. With no elegance of
presentation, it might be rescued by its storytelling, but there isn't any.
Hiromi Takizawa's Mylar raindrops, folded up on themselves and hung
from the ceiling with fishing wire, could have been Warhol interesting if
they covered more territory in the gallery, but the handful presented is too
paltry to make an impression. I applaud Julie Easton's White
Waves and Pink as the most experimental—made with burnt rolling
papers; while I admire her OCD formalism, I couldn't help but wish there
was more life in their shimmering beauty. I wanted to like her work, but I
simply can't give a thumbs-up to work that looks like it should be in a
dentist's office.
Dave Barton
Dave Barton has written for the OC Weekly for over twenty years, the last eight as their lead art critic. He
has interviewed artists from punk rock photographer Edward Colver to monologist Mike Daisey,
playwright Joe Penhall to culture jammer Ron English.